Yes, GoDaddy was around for many years and have thousands if not millions customers using them.
Yes, I am using and was helping with their hosting on number of sites and for number of years, hence first hand experience.
Yes, pricing could be considering being good.

No, I would not recommend them to anyone.
No, they are not competitive offering anymore.
No, I would not trust them to represent my best interest hosting my site.

This is why:

No PHP 7.x support for shared hosting

5.6 is only highest available option

5.6 is EOL for number of months with end of security updates support in few months when counting in activities which need to be taking place for people to move to higher version

If one wants to take advantage of security, resource utilization and performance improvements, goDaddy would attempt to push switch to dedicated server package, i.e. asking for more money for the same set of features

Then there are discussions like this and comments from “GoDaddy Pro Trusted Advisor”
While everyone is entitled to their own opinions based on their own previous experience, it is ridiculous to argue that all people essentially should be driving old gasoline hungry cars because they can still be driven and one still like their own nice 1990 Buick.

From personal experience – goDaddy representative was saying “php 7 would be soon available” since last quarter of 2016

Any questions about up-to-date feature set ends with “time to upgrade and pay more” pitch.

<end of rant>

Conclusion: if you are looking for web hosting, don’t look at GoDaddy, look elsewhere. There are more modern offerings around there from other reputable companies and with more bang for the buck

This is really a short note but may require some thinking when one run into it… so there you go.

Let me start by saying that I do have strong preference sub domain based WordPress Network instance over sub-folder.
In my opinion it is easier to maintain, and allow to manage stronger security.

Ok, “what is the problem?”, you ask.

Let’s say you have setup your blog as sub-domain to your main site. It may be the same machine or different instance altogether.
You run it for a while and there come time when you decided you want to host second blog and want to share the same WordPress instance.

Multi site support in WordPress is for a while and it is easy to setup and easy to maintain.

But there is a catch, if you run blog on the sub-domain, network setup wizard would warn you that you cannot enable network using sub-domain.
Not a problem – modify your wp-config.php by adding the following lines

Now you can logoff and log back in and you should be able to create new sit using different sub-domain.

This is not all – what you will most likely run into is inability to use the same users across both sites.

Note: It is important to understand that by using the same names across multiple sites you may slightly reduce your security protection.
So make sure that you are:

Keep your Network instance up to date with updates

Using Security plugin like iThemes Security

Change admin user to something other than “admin”

Protect site from brute force attacks

What could happen is that when trying login to second site or switch between sites from Admin panel you would get message that your browser does not support cookies or you will not be able navigate to second site’s Dashboard.

What is the problem? Problem is how WordPress maintains user session using cookies.

If you one lucky user of GoDaddy shared hosting, well… you are in luck…

GoDaddy uses most awkward Control Panel setup on the market when it comes to site setup.

Usual site setup consists of two common tasks:

managing site code

managing site URL

Usually if one wants to have more than one domain one would make deployment of each site in sub-folder of the root FTP.

Grand idea of GoDaddy is that they want you to have only one site per one domain associated with any hosting package by disallowing association of the top level domain with sub-folder as mentioned above.

Technically you are not prohibited from acquiring more domains or doing anything else, but you would run into situation that support team would play coy about how to set everything up.
You will be out of luck of trying and escalate issue – “this is how it is done, and you cannot do anything about it”…

Once in a lifetime you may run into support tech who may spill the secret steps:

Start by going to http://gateway.godaddy.com. Select record associated with domain

Click Settings

In popup screen, enter any other domain name than one you would want to use
This could be considered strange, but do it. Come up with some strange name and give it a go. That is most important step. Complete it all the way and let system simmer for some time between 5 and 30 min to allow DNS changes to propagate.

After applying, you will be back in previous screen and you can click Manage to go to cPanel

Scroll down to Domains and click Addon Domains

Now you can use your real domain and create proper record to point at sub-folder on your FTP – ex: /public_html/my_domain
where /public_html/ is your root

About

From being a junior developer all the way to Development Manager position, I was always interested in new technologies. Passionate speaker, IT junky, developer, architect, team lead, and development manager - many hats, one goal - making software better and closer to people’s needs. For the most part I am using my blog as a scratch pad, writing small articles on things which I came across, was asked about more then once, and which would otherwise require additional research again and again.

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